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Vice President Kamala Harris has captured the support of a key coalition of progressive, youth-led and environmental justice-focused climate advocates, with the Green New Deal Network slated on Wednesday to announce its endorsement of her candidacy.

The development can cut two ways for the Democrats. On the one hand, it’s a boost for Harris from members of a voter segment that analysts agree will be key to victory in November. On the other hand, it’s fodder for former President Donald Trump’s campaign as it coalesces around a strategy of painting Harris as a radical leftist who will block U.S. oil and gas development.

Whether it helps or hurts Harris, the endorsement shows how the Democrats’ late-season candidate switch has upended the 2024 campaign among climate voters.

The Green New Deal Network never gave its endorsement to President Joe Biden, who had rankled coalition members on a wide variety of issues, from his support of Israel in its Gaza offensive to his approval of a large fossil fuel project in Alaska.

Although Biden has taken historic action on climate change, polls showed that he never regained traction with the young voters who lifted him to victory in battleground states in 2020. The Green New Deal Network said it sees Harris as bringing to the race a unique record of opposition to Big Oil and an ability to communicate forcefully on environmental justice as a woman of color.

“This has really lit a candle of hope for a lot of us that have been in the doldrums for the past year or so,” said Kaniela Ing, national director of the Green New Deal Network.

He said the support is not just about climate, but also represents hope for more robust U.S. policy to protect the people of Gaza and Harris’ voice as a champion of abortion rights and communities burdened by pollution. Ing himself is a Native Hawaiian who has written about the combination of historic social injustice and climate change that has threatened his home island of Maui, devastated by deadly wildfire a year ago.

“What the Green New Deal really is, is understanding that everything’s connected,” Ing said. “Making sure our tax dollars aren’t just going to kill children abroad, but to build schools and hospitals here at home. … Local control of resources, self-determination of our communities. That’s the vision Kamala Harris, given her background—being bused to schools, really being a product of a lot of our social programs—really understands.”

Reviving the Youth Vote

The Green New Deal Network is a coalition of about 20 climate groups, among them the Sunrise Movement, the Climate Justice Alliance and Greenpeace. They are groups that support major government investment in solving the climate crisis and addressing historic social injustice “to actually meet the scale and scope that this crisis demands,” Ing said.

Last year, the network participated in campaigns that led to passage of Green New Deal-oriented legislation in 13 states, including New York, Delaware and Minnesota. And the network is pushing for federal legislation to invest in a massive green overhaul in U.S. transportation.

Ing said the network’s members represent millions of individuals in thousands of local affiliates.

“We bring that network of local groups and community power, including in really key areas like Pennsylvania and Michigan,” Ing said. “These are really groups that are going to spread the word, go knock on those doors, make those phone calls. We’re going to be right there with Kamala and we’re asking her to be right there with us, and to even spine up and embolden her platform.”

Although Harris’ candidacy was endorsed by other major green groups within hours of her taking up the torch from Biden, those organizations—the League of Conservation Voters Action Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund, the Sierra Club and Clean Energy for America Action—all had supported Biden’s candidacy as well. The Green New Deal Network’s endorsement is an inflection point in the campaign for climate-oriented voters.

“I think it’s incredibly important,” said Tom Bonier, a Democratic strategist who is chief executive of The Tara Group and senior advisor to the data firm TargetSmart. He sees it as an opportunity to address the reason Trump was running neck-and-neck with Biden, and even surpassing him in some swing state polls. “When you look at the actual dynamic, and you dig into the numbers … a couple of groups have really been underperforming up until last week for President Biden that have really driven the closeness of this race.” Those groups were younger voters and people of color.

The risk was not so much that they would flock to Trump, but that they would benefit him by either not voting or switching to a third-party candidate.

The youngest voters consistently have the lowest voter turnout of any age group. But that changed in recent election cycles where Democrats have exceeded expectations—including the 2018 midterm elections that swept in Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and other Democrats to gain control of the House, as well as in Biden’s 2020 election victory. “A lot of that was driven because youth turnout was much higher than normal,” Bonier said.

Younger voters, in particular, were motivated by the climate action focus of Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal campaign and Biden’s Build Back Better platform.

“When you look at the issues that seem to make the biggest difference in political decision-making for younger voters, the two biggest issues at this point seem to be abortion rights and the environment,” Bonier said. Research the polling firm Hart Research conducted last fall showed that 58 percent of 18- to 39-year-olds say the issue of climate change is very important to them personally, and 36 percent said it was one of the top-tier issues that matter most to them in the 2024 election. 

The Green New Deal Network endorsement brings to the fore one of the fundamental questions the Harris campaign faces in the coming weeks—whether she should seek to edge out Trump by peeling off moderate-to-conservative voters or by consolidating support of the party’s progressive base.

Trump regularly inveighs against the “Green New Scam,” and his campaign has made clear its view that a path to victory lies in subverting Harris’ hope of gaining middle-of-the-road voter support. After a Harris campaign spokesman told POLITICO on Sunday that “she would not ban fracking,” Trump’s team put out a long email detailing Harris’ past statements and actions against hydraulic fracturing, the process that has driven a boom in U.S. oil and gas production over the past decade.

The Trump team’s bill of particulars against Harris may read like a winning resume to progressives: the lawsuit she filed as California attorney general to stop the Obama administration’s plan to permit fracking off the Pacific coast; her co-sponsorship of the Green New Deal when she was in the Senate; and statements she has made expressing support for banning plastic straws and encouraging less red meat consumption.

The Independent Petroleum Association of America, which includes some of the small oil and gas operations that are big supporters of Trump, put out its own political analysis launching this line of attack against Harris the day after Biden dropped out of the race.

“While environmental activists may be cheering, Harris’ record is directly in conflict with key battleground voters that will decide this election,” said a post on IPAA’s Energy in Depth website.

But Ing said he is confident that Harris’ record can give her the winning edge, especially among members of his network.

“It’s going to come down to turnout,” he said. “And if her base doesn’t turn out, we lose. Because we know the MAGA base is turning out. The idea that we’re going to fight over this fabled Nikki Haley voter … I just think it’s a losing proposition. What she really needs to do is deliver for the people that really support her rather than trying to chase this fabled unicorn of the Never Trump voter or Republican voter.”

‘Inspiration Up on Top’

The Green New Deal Network’s endorsement decision was made by the group’s leadership. At least one member of the network’s steering committee—Sunrise Movement—has not gone so far as to endorse Harris itself. The group’s leaders said an endorsement is not off the table, but Sunrise would have to go through a full membership vote—a process that involves the organization’s more than 100 member hubs across the country.

Sunrise did not officially endorse Biden in 2020, but the group did significant grassroots work to mobilize young voters for Biden and down-ballot Democrats, and Sunrise executive director Aru Shiney-Ajay said Sunrise is committed to mobilizing voters against Trump again this year.

“For us, an endorsement is not just about whether or not we will do electoral work for that candidate … but more about whether that candidate reflects the policies, the vision and the values that we are trying to push in the world,” Shiney-Ajay said. “I just want to be very clear that no matter what, we’re going to be going in to defeat Donald Trump and we’re very excited about that.”

Shiney-Ajay also said Harris has an opportunity to win over young peoples’ support by investing in green jobs, expanding clean energy, ending fossil fuel subsidies, and investigating oil and gas companies. The group rallied at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in D.C. on Monday to urge Harris to heed their demands.

Some of the main distinctions that the progressive groups see between Biden and Harris are not on policy per se, but on the ability to inspire. Ing said Biden deserves credit because he “delivered big on the investment side” to address climate change, particularly with passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.

But Biden had a hard time communicating about those climate achievements or his plans to go farther to reduce climate pollution and build a cleaner economy in his next term.

“I think we’re at a point right now in the U.S. where we really need some inspiration up on top,” Ing said. “To let people know that everything is going to be OK—that the country may seem divided, but we have a lot in common. We didn’t get that from Trump, but we also didn’t get that from Biden. And I think Kamala has a chance to really come back and sort of be that Obama figure again and reunite the nation.”